OxiDex

A high-performance Rust implementation of ExifTool for metadata extraction and manipulation.

What is OxiDex?

OxiDex is a memory-safe, drop-in replacement for the Perl-based ExifTool. It covers 16,677 metadata tags (58% ExifTool parity) across 140+ formats, with significantly better performance through Rust's zero-cost abstractions and parallel processing.

Why OxiDex?

• 3.7-9.7x faster than Perl ExifTool (see benchmarks)
• Memory safe - No buffer overflows, use-after-free, or data races
• Drop-in compatible - Same CLI arguments as original ExifTool
• Cross-platform - Static binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows
• Library + CLI - Use as a Rust crate or standalone binary
• AI-powered detection (optional) - Magika deep learning model for enhanced file type detection (--features magika)

Quick Start

Download Binary

Pre-built binaries available on the Releases page.

Usage

# Extract all metadata
oxidex photo.jpg

# Extract specific tags
oxidex -Make -Model -DateTimeOriginal photo.jpg

# Write metadata
oxidex -Artist="Your Name" photo.jpg

# Batch processing
oxidex -r /path/to/photos/

# JSON output
oxidex -json photo.jpg

Optional: Magika AI-Powered Detection

Build with the magika feature to enable Google's deep learning model for enhanced file type identification (~99% accuracy across 200+ formats), selectable at runtime with --detector=magika:

cargo build --release --features magika
oxidex --detector=magika unknown_file

Documentation

• User Guide - Installation, usage, and format support
• Benchmarks - Performance comparison with Perl ExifTool
• API Reference - Rust library documentation
• AI Harness - The autonomous fleet that closes ExifTool tag-coverage gaps, and its measured results
• GitHub Issues - Bug reports and feature requests

Closing the parity gap

Tag coverage is extended by an autonomous AI harness ("the fleet") that compares OxiDex against real ExifTool, asks a language model to patch the gaps it finds, and puts every candidate patch through a gate stack — apply, build, re-compare, targeted tests, duplicate check, reviewer, full test suite — before anything is committed.

docs/AI_HARNESS.md documents how it works end to end and what it has actually produced: 67 tag gaps closed with measured evidence, per-model patch-apply rates, a full failure taxonomy, and an explicit list of the figures that could not be measured.

Development

Prerequisites

Install development tools via Homebrew:

brew install cargo-watch cargo-nextest cargo-audit cargo-outdated

Install additional tools via Cargo:

cargo install cargo-tarpaulin

Just Commands

This project uses just as a command runner. Run just to see all available commands:

just          # List all commands
just ci       # Run full CI checks
just test     # Run all tests
just lint     # Run clippy linter
just fmt      # Format code

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Please ensure:

• Tests pass (cargo test)
• Code is formatted (cargo fmt)
• Clippy lints pass (cargo clippy)

License

GPL-3.0

Acknowledgments

Inspired by and compatible with ExifTool by Phil Harvey. OxiDex is an independent reimplementation.